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I am cleaning up another person’s regular expressions and they currently end all of theirs with
.*$
So wouldn’t the following be exactly the same?
.*
.*will match as much as it can, but by default.doesn’t match newlines. If the text you’re matching against has newlines and you’re in MULTILINE but not DOTALL mode, then.*$might not match where.*does. Without newlines (or if you’re not in MULTILINE) or if you’ve set DOTALL, they’re identical since*is a greedy operator and will match as much as it can.In the end though, the exact answer depends on the regular expression engine. So your results may differ.